Scott Stinson: It’s McGuinty’s job to push for action in Elliot Lake

Elliot Lake intervention is part of Dalton McGuinty's job as premier: Scott Stinson

In times of crisis, we want our politicians to act. More specifically, we want them to be seen to be acting.

It is why, when a political leader chooses not to immediately visit the scene of a disaster, questions are immediately raised about that person’s response. Don’t they care? Stephen Harper is called heartless for not personally visiting a native reserve during a housing crisis. Barack Obama is said to have bungled the response to the BP oil spill because he didn’t show up to furrow his brow at the blackened ducks.

Now it is Dalton McGuinty’s turn at crisis management, where the Ontario premier is facing criticism not just for his lack of a visit to Elliot Lake, site of a deadly mall collapse, but for his decision to step in and order, more or less, the resumption of an abandoned rescue effort.

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It did not take long from the moment the Toronto-based search and rescue team walked away from the Algo Centre Mall on Monday night, citing an imminent threat of further collapse, for Mr. McGuinty to act. For him to be seen to act.

His office released a statement saying he wanted officials to try to find some other way of accessing the inside of the building, where it’s possible survivors still remain. “We owe it to the families waiting for word of their loved ones to leave no stone unturned,” the statement said.

By Tuesday morning, the premier was repeating those kinds of words at a press conference, and his government was sending out press releases that itemized the various things the province was doing to try to aid the situation in the Northern Ontario city of 12,000. It was sending cranes and robots. It was talking to the Canadian Forces. It had a mining engineer on standby. It was not leaving stones unturned.

Though the Premier was careful to say on Tuesday that he did not want to second-guess the decisions of the emergency-response team on the ground, his actions suggest otherwise. And now he has left himself open to accusations that he is interfering with the decisions of trained professionals. He must have decided that sitting on his hands would be worse.

In terms of the province’s handling of the mall collapse, though, Mr. McGuinty’s decision to step in may prove to be the least of his concerns. The premier dismissed questions about the delayed response to Elliot Lake on Tuesday — the town’s mayor, for one, said he didn’t hear from Mr. McGuinty until two days after the collapse — as he said it was more important to focus efforts on the rescue rather than “the blame game.” He was greatly assisted in this matter by Ontario’s Opposition leader, Tim Hudak, who said it was important to focus on “getting folks out” and said he agreed with the premier’s “natural human reaction” to intervene.

“Leave the questions to later,” Mr. Hudak said.

But the questions will come. Did the province’s emergency response system fail to respond? Should the rescuers have stopped when they did? There certainly seem to be experts saying no and yes, respectively.

But the people of Elliot Lake, and the province at large, may not be easily convinced. And so, Mr. McGuinty acted. Because that’s what you do.
National Post, with files from The Canadian Press• Email: sstinson@nationalpost.com | Twitter: scott_stinson